Movies and Film: The Star System

The Star System

One of the most important, familiar, and controversial contributions of film to the long cultural history of acting is the star system. It is true that opera, theater, and other performing arts created international stars well before the advent of cinema. The Italian singers known as castrati dazzled the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century operatic world with their unparalleled vocal virtuosity, becoming heroes to the flocks of adoring fans who showed up at every performance to worship them.

The world's first bona fide movie star was Mary Pickford, who won the heart of D. W. Griffith in the early 1900s and, by the mid-1910s, was known the world over for her sweet disposition and the aura of innocence she projected onto the screen. Like all American film actors in the early years, Pickford wasn't known by name until years after her cinematic debut. By the time she started her own production company, The Mary Pickford Company, she was pulling in more than half a million a year in dozens of pictures that made her an international sensation.

The American star system is one of the most dominant shaping forces in contemporary moviedom. While studio heads still control the purse strings, individual stars can make or break a blockbuster deal with a single phone call. An ideal example of how the star system works can be found in the career of Harrison Ford, who got his big break (there's an understatement!) playing Han Solo in George Lucas's Star Wars (1977). Ford's swashbuckling space cowboy propelled him through the two sequels and directly into the Raiders of the Lost Ark series, by the end of which he was America's most popular and highly paid male lead whose presence in the credits continues, with a few scattered exceptions (for example, The Devil's Own, 1997), to guarantee a film's smashing success.

What makes the star system so fascinating, though, is that no matter what kinds of roles Ford plays—a Philadelphia cop (Witness, 1985), an American businessman abroad (Frantic, 1988), a CIA bureaucrat (Clear and Present Danger, 1994), a fugitive from the law (The Fugitive, 1993)—we'll always view his films through the original lens of his performances in Star Wars and the Indiana Jones series. This explains why the blockbuster Ford vehicle Air Force One (1997) worked so well: Even as the president of the United States, Harrison Ford will machine-gun and karate and commando his way out of any situation and save a planeload of loyal followers in the process.

Another crucial point to remember: The successful entry of any given actor or actress into the pantheon of American superstars often has nothing to do with his or her actual talent. Sometimes ambition, luck, looks, and persona can carry the day, and there are plenty of box-office sensations out there (we won't name names because we don't want to get sued!) who have displayed less skill in their entire careers than Laurence Olivier did in a single scene of Henry V (1944). Nevertheless, the star system is a bizarre, often disturbing, but probably permanent part of American and world cinema.